Abby stood up, looking concerned. ‘Do you really think you can help me look like a girl?’
I’m sure we can,’ she said, smiling.
Abby smiled weakly back. ‘Thank you, Claire.’
Claire watched her trail down the stairs, looking slightly less forlorn than when she’d arrived, and then she made sure everything was shipshape, switched off the lights and closed the door.
Much to her surprise, she found Maggs waiting for her on the landing. ‘Well …’ Maggs said. ‘Have you read it?’
Read what? Claire almost said, and then she remembered. She hadn’t used that handbag since last week and she’d made herself forget about the letter. Besides, she’d had other letters on her mind since then – a string of notes going backwards and forwards between her and her cheeky neighbour. On the one hand, he was driving her crazy, but on the other, she had to admit he had quite a way with words, and sometimes he could be quite funny.
No, she thought to herself. Do not be sucked in by surface charm. That was how her mother had got snared by her father. He’d seemed lovely while they’d been going out, courteous, strong, principled. It was only after she’d married him that she’d discovered just how iron-clad those principles were, and just how exacting he could be if anyone failed to meet his standards.
Okay, her downstairs neighbour was nothing like him – mainly because he had no standards whatsoever – but the advice was good all the same. Always look deeper. Always look beneath. Exactly what she hadn’t done with Philip.
Her ex-husband proved her point quite nicely. He’d seemed the polar opposite from her father when she’d met him. He’d been romantic and affectionate and thoughtful, but she’d still fallen into her mother’s trap. Maybe she wouldn’t have if Mum had been around to warn her. Gran had tried, but Claire had pigheadedly refused to listen, and then, after a few years, when she’d really realised what he was like, she’d been too stubborn and proud to admit she was wrong.
Anyway, she didn’t want to think about Philip. It was over. In the past. She was moving on, just as she had done with her father.
They started walking down the stairs, and Claire could feel Maggs looking at her. ‘What?’ she asked.
‘Well? Have you read it?’ Maggs said, rather impatiently. It was only then Claire realised she’d been so lost in thought – hijacked first by Mr Dominic Arden and then her ex – that she’d forgotten to answer her.
‘Sorry,’ she said laughing. ‘Away with the fairies. And, no, I haven’t read it. I don’t intend to. I told you that last week.’
Maggs didn’t say anything. Didn’t mean she wasn’t communicating heaps.
‘I know you think it’s a mistake,’ Claire continued, ‘but I can’t do it. What happened, happened, and I have no desire to revisit it. What was it that Doris’s brother said about her? Something about her never being concerned beyond what the momentary problem was … That’s how she’s managed to say stay so bright and sunny in the face of everything that happened to her, and I think I’m going to adopt that philosophy.’
Maggs just grunted softly. ‘That all sounds very pretty, but don’t forget … the past has a habit of coming back to bite you in the derrière whether you want it to or not.’
‘Don’t you worry about my derrière,’ Claire said, as they emerged into the lounge bar of The Glass Bottom Boat. Kitty, Grace and Abby were sitting at a small table, the vintage girls talking animatedly, Abby looking slightly bemused. George was hovering near the door. He looked as if he was about to say something as Claire and Maggs approached, but Maggs just gave him a little wave and carried on out the door.
‘Claire said she’d give me a lift again this week,’ she said, as she swept past, too late to see George’s expression turn from hopeful to crestfallen. Claire didn’t miss it though.
She almost said something to Maggs, but Maggs was wearing that inscrutable, don’t-try-to-mess-with-me expression that Claire knew only too well. She’d say something, all right, but with Maggs timing was everything. She’d just have to pick her moment carefully.
They walked slowly down the street in silence. This week she hadn’t been able to find a space near the pub, so she’d had to park down the side of the playing fields opposite, but it was a nice night for a walk – warm, not as sticky as recently, and the proximity to midsummer meant that it wasn’t fully dark yet and a slash of turquoise edged the horizon, despite the fact it was past ten.
Claire walked, trying to keep her mind on the sound of her shoes on the cracked paving stones, on the hum of a city summer night – dogs barking, neighbours arguing, someone somewhere playing a radio too loud so the music drifted between the houses and out into the almost-deserted park. But her mind refused to focus on these concrete, present day things. Now that Maggs had brought him up, it kept drifting back to her father, images of him, memories. She felt as if her mind was a runaway car, which kept veering slowly off in the wrong direction and then she’d notice and grab the steering wheel and coerce it into going back onto the route she’d planned for it.
She didn’t want to think of him.
If anything, she should want to think of her mother, who’d been wonderful and loving and resourceful. She’d been gone ten years now. If she’d known their time together was going to be cut short, she’d have asked more questions. Or maybe not. In her twenties, she wouldn’t have known the right things to ask. Maybe it was only now she was older with one bad marriage behind her herself, that she wished she could ask Mum if it had been the same for her.
At least she’d separated from her toxic husband. Why hadn’t Mum left her father? Why had she waited for him to do it to her? Why hadn’t she ever stood up to him? After he’d left, she’d blossomed into being the bright and funny and strong woman Claire would always choose to remember her as.
Suddenly, a question popped free, one she hadn’t realised she’d needed the answer to until it left her mouth. She glanced across at Maggs. ‘Did he ever hit her? My mother?’
They kept walking, but something about the atmosphere between them changed. The air grew stiller, thicker.
He hadn’t ever hit Claire, although she’d always been afraid he might. She could remember a specific look in his eye that had always made her stomach quiver. A tingle of cold ran up her spine now, just thinking about it.
Maggs kept her focus straight ahead. When they reached Claire’s car, she stopped and turned to face her. ‘Honestly? I don’t know … Maybe.’
Claire nodded.
She was starting to fear she’d known the answer for a long time, but just hadn’t dared face it.
She unlocked the car and opened the door for Maggs. When they were both settled inside, before she turned the key in the ignition, Maggs spoke again. ‘I know Laurie was always worried for your mother when he got into one of his moods. We didn’t talk about it. People didn’t in our day. It was the sort of shameful thing you just swept under the carpet, but I guessed she suspected what her son was capable of.’
Claire shook her head. ‘I don’t understand it. How did such a lovely woman as my grandmother raise such a cruel, dysfunctional son?’
Maggs let out a heavy breath. ‘You don’t remember much about your grandfather, do you?’
‘No,’ Claire replied slowly. Just a vague memory of a stern man with white hair.
‘I keep thinking about him recently,’ Maggs said quietly, all the usual sass and sarcasm gone from her voice. It made her sound younger, less invincible. ‘I never liked him, you know, not even right back at the start. Maybe I was jealous he stole my best friend, or maybe I just saw a little bit into Laurie’s future. I don’t know …’ She breathed in sharply. ‘Anyway, I think he had a lot to